Gordon Kent

DAMAGE CONTROL

To the men and women, Japanese and American, who stopped Aum Shinrikyo

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Prologue

Day One

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

Day Two

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

Day Three

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

Day Four

32

33

34

35

36

Coda

By Gordon Kent

Author’s Note

Copyright

About the Publisher

Prologue

In a porcelain bowl floats a single lotus flower, waiting.

Meditation appears to the untrained as a passive activity. To the observer, the practitioner’s body seems poised but relaxed, the breathing even, the face calm. Westerners speak dismissively of men “studying their belly buttons.”

Mohenjo Daro sits easily on a low leather divan, his long legs crossed under him and his arms relaxed, hands resting easily on his knees. Aside from his pose, little about him suggests meditation. He wears a simple silk sweater from Italy and jeans. His face is that of a warrior from ancient Indian art, with rugged features and a pale walnut color. He was, and is, handsome, in a military way, the iron gray in his hair accenting the strong wrinkles in his skin. Nothing about him speaks of the ascetic except that his feet are bare.

His eyes are open. The pupils are huge, black, and blank, the irises almost as dark under heavy brows. And between them, exactly where a Brahmin’s caste mark would be, there is a birthmark, a third eye placed by nature.

The lotus flower. Daro sees it, regards it as a composite of organic material, as a symbol, an object of power. He seeks to know it without effort, to comprehend both the flower before him and the totality of the lotus. And having accomplished this to his satisfaction, he watches this blossom curl and close and then open, the water undisturbed beneath it, the petals of the flower uncurling like stop-action photography. The petals reach their full, erotic opening, and then he watches them wilt and decay, the first touch of orange brown on the edges to the last black organic mold resting on the surface of the unmoving water. And then he begins to restore the flower, working the mold back to the ravaged blossom and then seeking the full bloom of perfect health. When the petals have risen from their watery grave and stand, shriveled but extant, once again attached to the stamen, Daro gives a sudden gasp as intense pain floods his abdomen, snapping his focus from the life of the flower to the dying of his own body.

In a porcelain bowl floats a single lotus flower, unchanged, but the man is writhing on his divan. The spasm passes, and he is angry, although the mood passes as quickly as the unfolding of the flower. He rises and zips on a pair of Spanish leather boots and crosses to the door, the flower abandoned. One hand remains on his abdomen.

He reentered his household when he left his meditation chamber. Outside waited the cares of the world as represented by his aide, Vashni, who bowed. He smiled at her. “Give me a lemon drop, Vash.”

She produced one, her head tilted to one side. She could read that his meditation was not satisfactory. “I have all the reports, sir. Our military situation is good. I have reports from each of our member units with their status and preparedness. Only the Nehru has not reported in, which was to be expected.”

“Excellent.”

“Some of the financial information is late from Delhi because the government closed the exchange early.”

“Really? Whatever for?”

“There was the threat of a terrorist act. Or so the television claims.”

“Any effect on us?”

“None.” She was confident, arrogant.

He was walking now, leaving meditation for business and chewing his lemon drop. She followed him, reading figures on the output of factories and the price quotes of stocks that he assimilated without need of a pen and paper in much the way he could know the fullness of the lotus. Details of military units loyal to him and prepared to act. As he expected. He was making enormous sums of money, also as expected. He went to his office, nodded gravely to his private secretary in greeting as he passed through the outer office and continued to his desk, his attention on Vash unwavering. She had already prepared his laptop with input from her own files and he clicked idly through PowerPoint slides that illustrated the points she was making.

“What a pity that we cannot simply buy the world and fix her,” he said with a smile, looking at the vast sums of money they were compiling.

Vash smiled in return.

Daro touched a button on his desk and ordered tea. Then he reached under his shirt and withdrew a small golden plastic shell and plugged it into his laptop. The screen cleared and another image took its place, then passed away in a swirl of graphics, to be replaced by a word-processing screen.

His private secretary, once a devout Muslim, came in with a tray of tea and set it on his desk. He paused expectantly, and Daro motioned him to sit and join them. “Really, Ali, you might as well drink tea with us. A few more people might help create a sense of drama.”

Both of them laughed. “Drama” was usually a word of opprobrium to the believers. In this case, the absence of drama was clear, and almost comic given the gravity of the moment.

“I could not sleep last night, sir,” Ali murmured. He was an old man; the admission seemed boyish.

“Goodness, Ali. You don’t have reservations? If you do, please tell me.”

“Not reservations, sir.” A certain gleam came into Ali’s eyes, almost rakish. “Eagerness.”

Vash nodded as well. “So long in the planning,” she murmured. “So quick in the execution.”

Daro smiled, opened his mouth, and was hit by another spasm. He put his head down and held his abdomen with both hands, and when he raised his head, much of the color had left his face. “It won’t be so quick, my friends, because something will go wrong.”

They looked startled.

He nodded and took a lemon drop from the bowl on his desk. “No plan survives contact with the enemy. We will act, and someone will react, and we will react to their reacting, and there will be conflict and uncertainty and death. Something will surprise us, and our true test will not be in the years we prepared but in the moments where we must react to something we have not expected. That is the way.”

Vash, the consummate businesswoman, shook her head. “After all this preparation, I expect better. I expect victory.” She sounded as if she demanded it.

“Have I taught you nothing?” The color was back in his face, and his left hand had moved from his abdomen. He sat straighter. He looked at Vash. “There will be no victory, Vash. Or if there is a victory, it will be so impersonal that we will not recognize it, and few of us will see it, or even enjoy it. That is what it means to be a servant rather than a master. We serve the earth. The earth will never thank us except by surviving and thriving when we are gone.”

She nodded with her eyes cast down. “I spoke rashly.”

“Excellent! If everyone remembered every lesson and had no thoughts of his own, we would be working for the opposite of entropy, I think. Are we ready?”

“I would have liked this naval exercise with the Americans to have finished.”

“Like all elements in strategy, the naval exercise will pose us both problems and solutions. I admit that your part would be easier if there were no exercise, but the greater plan would be harder.” He looked at Ali. “Are we ready?”

“Your household is ready to move to the secure location.” He nodded sharply, as if, unlike Vash, he had no doubts and that scored him a point.

Daro turned his attention back to the laptop and typed “Chaos” into the screen.

He moved the mouse arrow to the send button and caught their eyes with his, deep pools of black that gave away little light.

“Here we go,” he said, and clicked the mouse.

Day One

1
West Fleet HQ, Indian Navy, Mahe, India

For Commander Alan Craik, Fleet Exercise Lord of Light was the culmination of six months of work, and, with six minutes to startex, he was angry because he, as umpire, could see that one side was already cheating—the US side. He looked around the large room that housed exercise planning and control—banks of computers, a central console that blocked his view of part of the room, ratings and a couple of officers in Indian naval khakis, and his own two US personnel.

“Sir?” Benvenuto was a skinny kid from the boonies of northern New York, a long way from home in this Indian naval headquarters. “Admiral Rafehausen’s on the net for you, sir.”

Craik walked around the big console. In front of him was a bank of encrypted radios that kept him linked to the US forces at sea, four hundred miles to the west. He grabbed a head mike with earphones. “Good morning, sir.”

“You’re late.” He knew Admiral Rafehausen’s voice—an old friend, pilot of the first aircraft he ever flew on. “You sleep in, Al? Leaving Rose for a nautch dancer?”

“I don’t think they even have nautch dancers anymore.”

“You should get out more often, Commander. What you got for me?”

“I have startex minus six, and you have an S-3 way out of exercise start parameters, sir.” He trailed the mike cord so he could lean over the JOTS terminal—the Joint Operational Tactical System, which showed the entire exercise and could, if asked, show US and other forces all over the world—watching a lone S-3 Viking move at low altitude along the eastern edge of the Lakshadweep Islands. Paul Stevens, Alan thought to himself. Hotdogging. “I see him, Al. I guess he didn’t get the message.”

“I have to hold exercise start until that aircraft is within start parameters, sir.”

“Hey, Al, lighten up. I got my beach recon teams in the water now. I’ve got my decks full of guys waiting to launch and I can’t exactly call them off. My Combat Air Patrol is up and already needs fuel from the tankers on the deck. You know the drill, Al. Let’s just say I’ll ignore AG 702 for a while, okay? Can we get this thing underway?”

Alan ran the trackball over the American and Indian battle groups. The JOTS on Rafehausen’s carrier would show only the Fifth Fleet units, and the Indian admiral on board the Indian light carrier Vishnapatingham would see only his. It had taken weeks of computer work by the two nerds in Alan’s exercise detachment to make this mutual blindness happen, and now one pilot was screwing it all up. He wanted to argue, even to use his supposed power as umpire to stop the exercise, but the big point was to cooperate with India and make diplomatic points. Canceling would be really bad diplomacy.

Alan sighed. “Okay, we’ll go for startex. But you’re on your honor about reports from that S-3.” In fact, Rafe probably wouldn’t be forced to his honor; the S-3 was a long way south of the Indian battle group, and if Stevens turned on his radar before startex, he’d be admitting he was cheating.

The hell with it. Get it over with and go home. He was touchy because the umpire’s job had been wished on him only forty-eight hours ago. He had been supposed to honcho the intel side for the US and then go home, where right now he could be enjoying his wife’s birthday. For once.

“Four minutes to exercise start, then,” he said into his mike. Then Rafe, knowing Alan was angry, maybe feeling guilty, made small talk for forty seconds, and they ended the conversation as friends.

Alan turned to Benvenuto. “Three minutes to exercise. Start the message traffic feed.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

Across the room, Indian ratings were feeding the scenario setup into the two comm nets.

Everything was going to be fine.

Aboard Indian Submarine Nehru, Arabian Sea

The communications officer coughed into his fist for the second time and read the message again. He couldn’t control his thoughts, which twisted and turned through his convictions and his fears faster than he could clutch at them.

The day.

Around him, the enlisted men on the comms station reacted to his all too visible nerves. Ram Vatek, his most senior technician, raised an eyebrow.

He knew Vatek as one of the faithful. He leaned back and coughed into his fist again, focusing on Vatek’s loyalty, using the man’s face as an anchor to reality. He took a deep breath and exhaled slowly.

“It’s a new day,” he murmured and watched Vatek’s usually confident expression turn to apprehension.

The comms shack became still. Every man on duty knew what the words meant. Many of them knew parts of the overall plan. Knowing the plan and facing the grim reality of the message were different beasts.

No one in the comm shack flinched, however. They opened an arms locker that should not have been there behind the central computer processor and took out pistols, Tokarevs loaded with special low-power ammunition.

He pressed the push-to-talk button on the main comms console and spoke to the whole ship.

“Today is a new day,” he said, his voice unsteady as he spoke.

On the bridge, the navigator reached under his chart table and drew a Makarov pistol from its holster, turned, and shot the captain in the face. Under the pressure of the moment, he shot him repeatedly, pulling the trigger until the slide clicked open and the noise and smoke filled the bridge.

In the engine room, the second engineer drove a screwdriver into the abdomen of the engineer and stood appalled at the amount of blood that pooled on the smooth gray deck as his superior writhed. A rating shot the dying man in the head and seemed to enjoy the act. The engineer had not been a popular officer.

The second engineer looked at the blood on his hands and uniform and wanted to scream. And he looked at the wild eyes of the rating with the smoking gun and wondered what they had unleashed.

In the weapons space forward, two of the faithful shot their way through with smuggled Uzi Combat Commanders, killing every crewman in the space and inadvertently wrecking one of the operational weapons stations. A lot of the weapons techs were Sikhs and other unrecruitable sectarians, so they had to be killed.

In ninety seconds, the mutineers had control of the ship. Every man they believed might not be loyal to their cause, including a few who had received the indoctrination, was herded into the mess deck and locked down. Many others were killed because the mutineers, once blooded, were vicious. On the bridge, the navigator settled into the newly cleaned command chair and tried to ignore the smell of blood and feces.

“Make revolutions for five knots. Dive to one hundred fifty meters. Helmsman, make the course zero eight nine.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

The Kilo-class submarine turned to port and headed away from the exercise area and back toward the west coast of India.

In the comms shack, the communications officer sent a coded message using the small golden egg he wore around his neck. The message went out through the VLF antenna and was received at West Fleet Headquarters, Mahe, where it was routed with other exercise traffic to its addressee at a small naval test facility in southern India—and to the Indian exercise-control officer at exercise headquarters, where Alan Craik waited.

West Fleet HQ, Mahe, India

Intel officers wait, Alan thought as he watched a digital clock tick down toward the beginning of the fleet exercise. Two minutes twenty to startex. And worry. He was standing by the JOTS repeater, staring at it as if memorizing the position of every ship in both fleets, but he was thinking about his wife, Rose, wanting to be with her. He tried to focus on the exercise. He called across to a female US rating, the only other American there besides him and Benvenuto. “Borgman, give me an update on my comms with the two fleet commands.”

“Good to go, sir.” Borgman was a heavy-bodied woman with an almost childishly pretty face, a plodder who got things done with tenacity rather than brilliance.

He nodded and went back to the JOTS terminal and the glowing blobs that represented the American and Indian ships. Nothing had changed. He looked up and let his eyes swing over the room. An Indian rating named Mehta looked up and let their glances meet as if to say, We’re doing the best we can here.

A little more than a minute to go. Alan raised his eyebrows at Benvenuto.

“Good to go, sir,” Benvenuto said. He was looking at something over Alan’s shoulder as he said, “Data’s streaming—”

Aware then of somebody behind him, Alan turned, saw an Indian officer standing there, registered the single star on the collar, produced a name without having to look at the man’s tag—Commodore Chanda, the Indian exercise-control officer. Alan smiled, guessed that the answering scowl was prestart nervousness.

“Sir,” Alan said.

The commodore was watching the clock, must have been watching it when Alan turned around. Across the room, a nervous Indian lieutenant was also staring at the orange numerals.

The commodore was standing too close. Alan wanted to elbow him out of the way, of course couldn’t. He bent over the terminal, pretending to study the location of the American flagship. The commodore was right behind him. Well, he’s a commodore; he can stand where he—

The crease in the commodore’s trousers brushed the back of Alan’s right thigh; Alan shifted left to make room for the more senior man, shifted his eyes for a fraction of a second off the terminal, catching a whiff of some scent the Indian officer used, then flashed back to the terminal as it—inexplicably, surprisingly—darkened and lost its picture, like an eye blinking. He caught movement below him—

—and saw a hand emerging from a uniform sleeve with a commodore’s broad stripe on it, holding something glittering and brassy to the input port of the JOTS repeater.

“Hey—!” Alan started to say, grabbing, without thinking, at the hand. Then, too late, he said, “Sir—!” but the commodore’s enraged eyes had already locked into his.

AG 702, 20 NM WSW of the Lakshadweep Islands

In AG 702, the cheating S-3 that Alan Craik had seen on the JOTS and complained about to Rafehausen, Commander Paul Stevens was enjoying his nugget TACCO’s nerves. “Hey, Collins, you got that back end sweet yet?” Stevens tried not to lose an opportunity to give the kid the gears. In fact, as far as Stevens could tell, the “back end”—the big bank of antiquated computers that drove the airplane’s sonar-receiving and tactical displays—was functioning as well as it ever did, but the new LTjg didn’t know that.

“It’s, uh, it’s up, sir. I mean—”

“Jeez, Collins, either it’s up or it ain’t. I’m the pilot, not the TACCO. Which way do you want it?”

“It’s up.” Collins’s voice rose so that the response sounded more like a question than an answer.

Stevens hit his intercom so that only his copilot could hear him. “Kids ought to be out of diapers before they leave the RAG.”

“Give him a rest,” she muttered. Lisa “Goldy” Goldstein had fought her way out of the girl jobs in naval aviation and she had plenty of spine to stand up to Stevens, who was a great pilot and an okay squadron CO, but sometimes a total asshole as a human being. “Skipper, you blow that kid’s confidence, we still have to live with him the whole cruise.”

Stevens smiled. He liked Goldstein, and he liked that she stood up to him. “I can hear the snot in his nose every time he talks.”

“Yeah, skipper, and I can see the dust when you fart. Can we get this show on the road?”

Stevens grinned. “Roger that.” He cycled the intercom to the back end. “Collins, if you’ve got us a working computer, you and Whitehorse better start thinking of your sonobuoy pattern.”

Bobby Whitehorse, the enlisted SENSO Officer, or SENSO, was a shy, silent Indian kid from a reserve in the Dakotas. He listened, said nothing, and started to enter his projected pattern into the computer in front of him. As his facial expression rarely changed, it was difficult for the other troops in the squadron to figure out whether he was sullen-silent or shy-silent.

Stevens saw the little symbols on his pilot’s display. “Way over there?” he said. “You guys in back trying to run us out of fuel?”

“That’s where the ASW module told us to go, skipper,” Goldy said.

“Yeah, yeah. I came out this way to keep that big island between us and their radar.” Stevens was holding the plane about ninety feet off the waves beneath them, flying with one hand and turning his head to Goldy when he talked. One bad twitch and they’d have a wing in the water, but Stevens always flew this way and his crews got used to it. And they had to be under the opposing force’s radar horizon, because they were cheating—flying to a target before startex.

Stevens pushed the throttle forward and banked to the left, heading for the entry point to the pattern the SENSO had marked twenty nautical miles to the west.

“I have an ESM cut just beyond the island. Russian airsweep radar, second generation.” Collins sounded less nervous. He was better with the radar detection than with the sonar. “I’m putting it on screen. Second cut. Got a triangulation. See it, skipper?”

Stevens flicked his eyes from his instrument scan to the little screen on his console and winced. The Indians had at least a radar picket, maybe more, much closer to him than he had expected. This is where he and Rafe and the crotchety bastards in the anti-submarine warfare module had guessed they’d find the Indian sub early in the exercise. Rafe wanted it found and tagged from the get-go. And here the Indians were, with a radar picket right at the edge of the start area, looking out for someone like—

“Looks like we’re all cheating together,” Goldy said.

“Jeez, Craik might have warned us the Indians were this far south.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Stevens saw the flash off her visor as Goldy turned her head and looked at him. Clearly she didn’t agree with his views on cheating, either.

“Got another cut, skipper. Another air-search radar.”

“They shouldn’t be seeing us yet,” Stevens said, banking sharply to keep the bulk of the forty-mile-long island between his plane and the radar pickets on the other coast.

“Startex in one minute,” Goldy said. “I think we may be the first casualties in this thing.”

“Not if I can help it. Whitehorse, put a long pattern down here.”

Collins cut in. “We’re still seven miles from the drop—”

“Let’s put the first line in here and we’ll sneak up the coast low, drop a few more, and see what we get.”

Collins mumbled something about how far the Indian sub would have to be from her start position to be caught this far west.

“You got something to say, Mister Collins?”

“No, sir.”

Clunk. Each sonobuoy had the passive systems to listen for an enemy sub within a thousand yards or so, and a tiny radio transceiver to broadcast the digital data back to the plane. When the sonobuoy survived the drop to the water and the transceivers worked, it was a great system.

“Number one in the water and I have a signal.” Whitehorse had a flat, nasal voice.

Stevens thought it might have been the longest sentence he’d heard out of the boy.

Clunk.

“Number two in the water and—live. She’s good.”

Collins came in again. “Look at the salinity, Whitehorse. Where’s the layer?”

Stevens cut the nerd babble from the rear seats. He didn’t expect they’d find the sub, but it was an exercise and he didn’t want to be remembered as the first casualty.

Clunk.

“Startex,” Goldy said. The game was live; if anyone had seen them, they’d be called with an imaginary missile shot over the radio. Stevens looked at the digital readout on the encrypted comms without thinking, fearing the worst. Nothing came, and he smiled. He looked down where the live buoys from Whitehorse’s drops were matched up with the projected pattern and prepared to turn west toward the island after the next drop. At this altitude, even at low speed, every turn was exciting.

Clunk.

“I—uh, skipper? We—shit, there it is again. Maybe a sub?” Collins, from the back seat, with nerves making him sound like a girl.

Stevens made the turn to put the next buoy in the pattern.

“Whitehorse? You concur?”

“It’s a sub,” Whitehorse said. Flat and confident. “Diesel running about five knots.”

“Well, it’s a pleasure to know they’re cheating harder than we are,” Goldy said. “He’s at least a few miles off his start line.”

“I got him on two buoys. I got a fix.” Collins’s voice rose an octave. “Hey! There he is!”

Goldy tapped her helmet and cut out the back seats. “Want me to call him in to the boat?”

“No. Let’s drop an active on him so he’s dead and then call him in. Those pickets are right over there; we may be under their radar horizon but they’ll be on a broadcast like white on rice.”

“Roger that.”

“Whitehorse, you ready with an active drop?”

“Roger.” Whitehorse sounded interested.

“Collins, you ready? You going to fuck this up?”

“No—ah, yes. Sir. No.”

Goldy reached over and slapped Stevens on the helmet. Stevens gave her a smile that said, Yeah, I’m an asshole. Then he got the plane right down on the wave tops at the lowest speed he could manage and aimed for the datum, the little mark on his computer screen that told him where the sub was, one hundred and fifty meters down.

“Ready to drop,” Whitehorse said.

The high-bypass turbofans screamed like asthmatic banshees as he aimed for the datum.

Clunk.

“In the water. Ready for active.”

“Go,” said Collins.

Breeeet!

Every man on the submarine’s bridge heard the screech as the buoy went active. The former navigator froze, his mind blank.

“There is not another sub out here.” The second engineer sounded less positive than his words implied.

“Whoever that is knows where we are and that we’re leaving the exercise area. Battle stations!” the navigator said.

“It must be Americans from the exercise.”

“What are they doing over here?”

“Cheating. They’re famous for it.” The second engineer got down on the chart table.

Breeeet!

“It has to be an aircraft.”

Around them, sailors tumbled into their action stations, many of them looking sick and gray. The navigator still couldn’t focus his mind on the problem. No one had planned for detection this early.

“We have to shoot it down,” the second engineer said.

“What?”

“We have to shoot the American down.”

“What if he’s already passed on our location?”

“What if he has? It will be an hour before they can have another plane here. We’ll be long gone.”

The navigator hesitated and saw something he didn’t like in the second engineer.

“This is my decision.”

“Not if you endanger the mission.”

The navigator saw the gulf yawning at his feet. They were no longer part of a service with a hundred years of tradition. His whole view of himself and his place in the ordered universe shredded. He was alone, the captain of a ship of mutineers. And the second engineer was prepared to walk over his corpse if he didn’t act immediately.

“Surface!” he shouted. “Khuri, man the launcher. I want to hit him the moment the tower clears the water.”

“Aye, aye, sir.” Petty Officer Khuri was one of the few men qualified to fire the rotary missile launcher in the conning tower, and it could be fired only when they were surfaced.

“Satisfied?” he snarled to the second engineer.

The younger man nodded and shrugged, as if to say that events were his masters, not his servants. It was a popular saying among the faithful.

The navigator wondered how they would maintain discipline.

He felt the bow incline sharply.

“They’re coming up!” Collins said.

“Jeez! Well, that’s sporting. Goldy, snap a photo for the cruise book. Hey, Collins, you don’t suck as much as I thought. Whitehorse, that was sweet.”

“Can I call the boat?”

“Get the photo first.”

Stevens took his time, banked the plane and climbed a little to get Goldy a better camera angle and pointed the nose back at the datum, just a mile ahead. He could see the disturbance in the water where her tower was cutting the surface. Mighty fast for an exercise, he thought. Then the tower was clear, a black square against the sun-dazzled sea.

A little click in the brain, as a neuron fired on some half remembered—

“What the fu—” Not sun dazzle. Missile launch. “FLARES!” Stevens bellowed.

Collins, busy enjoying his first operational success with a cup of coffee, took a precious second to toss it aside before reaching over his head for the flare toggle which, being a careful young man, he had set to a three-second burst pattern when he entered the plane.

Stevens had no altitude and very little airspeed, but he did what he could. He rammed the throttle past max to military and put the belly of the plane toward the launches. He thought they were real. It made no sense, but he believed it and acted. His response was almost enough.

The flare pods fired continuously as he turned. The first missile chased a flare that burned as hot as the sun and its warhead fired, taking a precious piece out of the vertical stabilizer because the flares hadn’t had time or speed to deploy far from the aircraft. Stevens felt the change in handling and compensated. He was that good.

The second missile followed an earlier flare and detonated just off the port wing, its steel-cable warhead just missing the port engine and slicing through the aft cockpit, beheading Whitehorse in his seat and taking the top off the aft canopy. Wind and sun filled the airplane.

Stevens felt the change and reached down to pull the master eject as two more missiles slammed into his port wing, which separated from the plane as shrapnel shredded Stevens’s body and tipped his ejection seat as it fired to incinerate LT Goldstein before her seat could compensate.

A piece of the port engine struck Collins a glancing blow that broke most of his ribs. Because the first missile had ripped the canopy off the back seat, and Stevens’s last piloting had oriented the plane at right angles to the water, his own ejection was clean, and his seat shot him sideways, parallel to the sea, unconscious and mutilated. His luck lay in his angle.

The fourth missile hit the tons of fuel in AG 702’s belly and she exploded, but her death hid Collins’s ejection from the shooter on the conning tower of the Nehru. By the time his chute deployed, the tower of the sub was clear for diving, and Collins’s limp and bleeding body settled into the warm water more than a mile beyond the quickly sinking wreckage of his plane. His life vest inflated as it felt the salt, and a transceiver in the shoulder began to radiate his distress.

2
Mahe Naval Base, India

“Sir—!”

The Indian commodore’s eyes, widened with anger, stared at Alan. “Take your hands off me!”

But Alan didn’t let go. The other man’s rank meant less to him right then than his touching the JOTS, which had worldwide connections and was as sacrosanct as any piece of classified hardware the Navy owned—the reason that Benvenuto was posted to ride herd on it. For this exercise, Indian monitoring personnel were allowed to look at it but most definitely not to insert data or play with the controls; when they wanted data or a change of view—there had been a briefing specifically about this—they were supposed to ask Benvenuto or Alan. They did not work the JOTS themselves.

“Sir!” Alan still had a grip on the brown hand, his own good hand closed over it just behind the knuckles so that whatever the commodore had inserted into the port was still locked into Alan’s fingers “I’m very sorry, sir, but—”

“Let me go! This is an order! I will protest—”

“Sir, our orders are clear—nobody—”

The hand squirmed within his grip and the arm tried to pull away. “This is an outrage—!” Heads turned toward them. The Indian lieutenant who had been staring at the clock looked shocked now, an expression that Alan caught in a fraction of a second’s glance and registered as fear. The commodore was pulling harder, putting his considerable weight behind his effort, and his hand backed four inches away from the JOTS and then jerked, and Alan’s fingers, gripping harder still, slid down the long brown fingers and caught on something hard and smooth, and a gold chain attached to the glittering thing snapped and the commodore’s hand pulled free.

And Alan found himself holding a shell-like, golden object with a protrusion made to fit a USB port.

The commodore made a grab for it. Alan pulled away. “Benvenuto—!” The JOTS tender, frozen at the sound-powered phone, launched himself at the terminal. At the same time, the commodore, face flushed a muddy red, was bellowing across the space at the Indian lieutenant, the Hindi words lost to Alan. He closed the golden shell inside his hand and rapped out, “Benvenuto, do not let this officer approach the JOTS terminal! That’s an order!”

The hand came down and hovered near a sidearm. Alan took it in—the distorted face, the weapon, the rage—and wheeled to shout across the space to his communications specialist, “Borgman! Get Fifth Fleet HQ on Priority now! We have a situation here.” He whirled back to confront the Indian commodore. “Sir—please back off! You’re violating the terms of the agreement that set up this exercise. At once, sir!”

The commodore was shorter than Alan, trim, late forties. He hesitated long enough to meet Alan’s eyes and make some inner calculation, and he shouted again at the lieutenant.

And the lieutenant unsnapped his own holster with his left hand and drew an automatic pistol with his right and put it almost against Petty Officer Borgman’s head as she tried to raise Bahrain on the radio, and he pulled the trigger.

“No-o-o—!” Alan screamed. He would have gone after the lieutenant then, but he heard Benvenuto shout, and he turned and saw that the commodore had drawn his own weapon and was aiming it at him. Benvenuto caught the man’s arm and the gun roared, and Alan crossed the space between them in a stride and kicked the commodore in the groin, and then all hell broke loose.

The lieutenant took two shots at Alan and Benvenuto, and Alan hit the deck, pulling Benvenuto down with him. Somebody was screaming from the other side of the room. The commodore was on his knees, bent forward almost over Benvenuto’s legs; as Alan looked, he vomited.

“Holy shit—!” Benvenuto groaned. Alan leaned across the sailor to punch the side of the commodore’s head; the man lurched to Alan’s right, revealing the gun he still held in his right hand. Alan hit him again and grabbed the gun.

The lieutenant’s pistol barked and was met by a scream of pain from the doorway and a rattle of automatic-weapons fire; when Alan rolled back, he saw an Indian Marine sagging down the side of the entrance door, his hands closed over the front of a uniform blouse that was oozing blood. Another Marine, seen only as the forward half of an assault rifle and a pair of hands, was firing into the room, and another arm appeared and the hand grabbed the wounded man and pulled him out the door. Alan could look along the floor and see people lying flat around the room’s periphery, except for the lieutenant, who showed as a pair of legs protected from the doorway by the central console. Then another pistol started to fire, the source hidden from Alan by the console—one of the other Indian ratings, the only people over there. Jesus, they brought weapons and were waiting for their moment. But what the hell was all that with the golden thing and the JOTS? And then, belatedly, You don’t kill people so you can win an exercise—

He still had the golden device in his left hand, the bad one, the one with only three fingers because two had been blown off in a firefight years before. He wriggled the hand down into the leftside pocket of his khakis and leveled the commodore’s pistol in front of him along the floor and took aim at the lieutenant’s right foot.

“Sir!”

Benvenuto’s strangled shout brought him around in time to see the commodore climb over the sailor’s body, his left hand on Benvenuto’s throat, and then the commodore was gone behind the JOTS terminal and Benvenuto was trying to suck air into lungs that had been flattened by the weight of the commodore’s knees. He was a whiz-bang electronics tech but not much of a street fighter.

Then the automatic firing stopped, and there was a burst of pistol fire and a lot of shouting and the bang of a closing door, and then a sudden babble of voices that was like a kind of silence because there was no shooting under it.

“Sir, sir!” a voice shouted from the other side of the room. “Do not shoot us, sir! We know nothing about it, sir!”

Alan looked along the floor and saw Mehta’s face at his level. It was strained but sane, the more remarkable because he was lying in Borgman’s blood. “Sir—they went crazy—they are imposters or something—”

From habit, Alan glanced at the clock: the exercise had begun thirty-three seconds before.

Two new voices bellowed from the door, then a third. Alan rolled up and saw three Indian Marines with weapons pointed. He had a microsecond to make a decision, because one of the Marines was already looking at him and swinging his rifle. If they were with the commodore and the lieutenant, he was about to die and he should at least use the pistol in his hand; but if they were not with them—and they had returned the lieutenant’s fire, after all—then the worst thing he could do was fire on them, for they would surely kill him.

Alan slid the pistol over the floor toward the Marines. “Alan Craik, Commander, United States Navy,” he said. Saying it from a sitting position was not very dignified. Still, it seemed to work. The Marine’s eyes met his, took in his collar and his oak leaves, and the rifle swung away.

Then there was a lot of shouting in other languages, and Alan crawled on all fours to Benvenuto and made sure he was okay, and then he stood, using the JOTS terminal as cover, and looked around the space. The steel door to the planning room was shut; an Indian enlisted man was collapsed in a far corner, one pant leg soaked with blood. Mehta and another rating were tearing at the pant leg and trying to fashion a tourniquet. On the side near the clock, a rattled Indian EM was trying to explain to the Marines what had happened, while another was bent over a cell phone. The first one pointed at Alan and made a gesture, acting out the shooting of Borgman. The lead Marine, a sergeant, shouted back and at once everybody shut up. As if cued to that silence, an explosion from overhead rocked the building, and trouble lights flashed all over the communications consoles. The rating who had been talking to the sergeant flung himself at a console and began to flip switches.

The sergeant stood, half-crouched, his head tilted. He turned to look at Alan. Dust filtered from the ceiling. A fluorescent fixture swung down and held on by its wires. In the new silence, a rattle of gunshots sounded somewhere else in the building, and Mehta, his hands bloody, groped his way to a wall box with a red symbol on it and began to pull out first-aid supplies.

The sergeant duckwalked to Alan, gave a cursory salute, and said, “Sergeant Swaminathan, sir.” His voice had a pronounced lilt, the Indian accent that turns w to v.

“Is it a mutiny?”

The sergeant shook his head. “Very bad, sir. I think I have to take my men to barracks.”

“But the three who were here—they murdered one of my people!—they went through that door—”

“All very bad, sir. Best return to barracks.”

Alan wanted to storm the door to the next room to get at the commodore and the lieutenant. A steel door, no explosives, three Indian Marines. He looked them over—they were shiny-bright, spic and span, with knife-edged creases in their khakis and spit-shines on their shoes, dressed for display more than action. The sergeant was right; his best course was to find other Marines and make sense of what was going on. Plus there were four unarmed Indian enlisted personnel to worry about, one of them wounded, and Alan and Benvenuto and three more US personnel downstairs.

The commodore and the fleet exercise were the least of their worries.

An Indian communications man was shouting from the console. “All communications lost, sir—everything! I think it is the antenna array on the roof up there, blown all to flinders!”

“Can you telephone?”

The sergeant shouted at the Indian EM, who tried a telephone, shook his head, tried another and then another. The man with the cell phone was waving it. “No good—no good—no cell connection—!” He looked wide-eyed at Alan. “I cannot get through!” Whatever was happening was choking the cell-phone net.

“Very bad here, sir,” the sergeant said. “I take you and these personnel to some safe place, then report to my barracks.” He shook his head. “Very bad mess, sir.”

Alan hesitated. “I can’t just leave one of my people,” he said.

“She is dead, sir.”

Alan walked across to Borgman’s body. Somewhere outside, another explosion erupted and was answered by more small-arms fire. He knelt. Borgman’s face was partly gone, blood and tissue sprayed over the communications panels. Alan put his fingers where a pulse would have been in her throat, waited while twenty seconds ticked away on his Breitling.

Bahrain

They were all waiting for something, but nobody would say what it was, even though all four knew—Rose Siciliano Craik, assistant naval attaché, Bahrain; Harry O’Neill, big-bucks American convert to Islam; Mike Dukas, head of Naval Criminal Investigative Service, Bahrain; Leslie Kultzke, live-in interloper on Dukas’s life after following him all the way from Washington. What they were waiting for was Alan Craik, but he wouldn’t be home for more than three days.

When they had planned this gathering, he was supposed to be home, and then he had been made fleet-exercise umpire, and there went the notion that they would all be together for Rose’s birthday. Alan was the glue that held them, and, without him, there was this strange sense of waiting for somebody who wouldn’t show up.

The three old friends sat with their knees almost touching, laughing and mopping at spilled drops of coffee and licking fingers that had become coated with powdered sugar from Rose’s biscotti. Leslie sat a little apart, like a good child allowed to sit with the grown-ups. She smiled when they laughed, otherwise sat with a pretty good imitation of interest on her round face. She was twenty-two. They were nearing forty, in Dukas’s case more like forty-five.

Then the conversation ran down, and Harry said, “Shall we play a round of whatever-happened-to-old-so-and-so now?”

“We’re going to play let’s-help-Michael-lose-weight.” Leslie smiled at him as she said it, pulling the plate of biscotti away from Dukas’s hand. Quite opposite expressions flitted across their faces, his chastened, then irritated, hers mature and maternal. The change made Harry raise his eyebrows at Rose, who drew her own dark, thick brows together and gave him what her husband called “the look that kills.” Then she turned away and said in that voice that announces clearly that the speaker is trying to change the subject, “What do you think Alan’s doing right now? Mike—Harry—? What does the umpire do at the start of an exercise?”

Harry, who had been a junior intel officer ten years before, smiled and shrugged. “Stand around and try not to look bored, I suppose.”

Northern India

A closed car speeds along a highway. Vashni, Mohenjo Daro’s right hand, misses the comfort of their corporate headquarters, but she never questions Daro’s impulse to leave it and become anonymous. The lack of an office does not separate her from her networks: she has her headset on, watching the markets and her e-mails on VR glasses while Daro chats with the driver, a Tamil who joined the movement years ago.

As they make the turn from the main highway to the permanent traffic jam around the airport, she sees a flood of e-mails hitting her server. She reads. She touches Daro’s arm, her face averted, less because she continues to watch the screens in the VR goggles than because she doesn’t want to see his face and know again that she sees a dying man. “The Nehru has shot down an American plane.” She flips up her glasses. “Those idiots.” She looks at him.

One of the virtues that Mohenjo Daro possessed as a leader was that he never wasted time on recrimination, although he would certainly have been justified now. He had spent three years putting his own crew on the submarine and getting it into a situation where it could disappear. The Nehru should have been invisible to the joint exercise. It should have had the additional invisibility of their carefully laid misdirection of the American JOTS system. And now it had shot down an American aircraft!

“So much for stealth,” he said. He had rather liked stealth, she knew. He had hoped to avoid the messiness that came with open conflict. He smiled now as he saw the irony of it, close to religious revelation. Of course, the path to anarchy and healing lay through conflict, as he often told her. It was more ironic that he had tried to avoid it. She knew that his mind would now start wandering down corridors of paradox; she put her hand on his arm to remind him that she was waiting for his order.

“Implement Shiva’s Spear,” he said. “Better look at the next two layers and have those brought up to readiness.” He thought. “Assemble an operator team at one of our office locations.”

“Which one?”

“Choose one at random.”

Ahead, his gleaming helicopter waited on its pad. Mohenjo Daro sat back and contemplated the end of the world of men.

Mahe Naval Base, India

Running feet sounded outside in the corridor, then shouts and shots.

Alan had made his decision. “We have a vehicle in the fleet-exercise car park. I have to get to it.”

“I will try, sir.”

“Plus I got three more people downstairs.” And he wasn’t leaving without them, for sure.

The sergeant licked his lips, chewed on the upper one as if trying to bite the small moustache there. “Okay, we try.”

“Benvenuto, you okay?”

The young man was rubbing his throat. “Little hoarse, sir.”

“We have to disable the JOTS.” Alan jerked his head. The terminal was critical hardware, its innards as highly classified as anything the Navy had. “Out the window. It’s two floors down to asphalt.”

Benvenuto’s mouth opened. He was being asked to go from being the JOTS’ mother hen to its terminator in one breath. “Ok-a-a-a-y, sir—”

They got two of the Indian EMs to help while one of the Marines broke the unopenable window, and without ceremony they toppled the device over the sill. Alan leaned at the corner of the window and watched it smash on the pavement below. There was more shooting out there now, and when he raised his head he could see smoke billowing above a row of trees.

The sergeant was instructing the other Marines and the Indian personnel. Alan looked for the pistol he had tossed away but didn’t see it; he supposed that one of the Marines had kicked it out of the way. The sergeant was already by the door, bouncing up and down on his toes from tension. Alan got down low, spotted the pistol under a computer table, grabbed it, then looked around the ruined room, pausing for a bitter moment at Borgman.

“All right, let’s go.”

3
USS Thomas Jefferson

“Admiral on the bridge!” The sailor braced.

“Stand easy.” Rafe came off the starboard ladder and waved at the bridge crew. “You guys have coffee for an old man?” He turned to Rick Madje, his flag lieutenant, who was holding a phone out to him. Rafe raised his eyebrows.

“Captain Fraser on the Picton.” HMCS Picton was a Canadian frigate attached to his battle group, the ship Alan had complained about because Rafe had put it way down south as a radar picket with orders to stay in Emissions Control, or EMCON—the regulation of outgoing EM transmissions across the spectrum—until she had a chance to shoot.

“Captain Fraser?”

“Sorry to break EMCON, Admiral, and I’m on satcom to make us harder to track.”

“Sure, Alex, sure.”

“Sir, I’m calling to protest two inbound ‘missiles.’ I’ve called Exercise Control four times to note them as intercepted and they don’t respond.” The “missiles” would really be aircraft imitating missiles as part of the exercise.

“Roger, Alex. I hear you. We haven’t been able to raise ExCon since a few seconds after startex ourselves. Something’s gone down at their end.”

Rafe could hear the relief in the Canadian’s voice. “That’s okay, then. But be aware that two Indian Air Force Jaguars went over my position about six minutes back and went into a missile profile.”

“Got it, Alex. I’ll pass that to Air Ops.”

“Out here, sir.”

“Stay alive, Alex. Keep up the good work.”

Rafe turned to Madje. “You get all that?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Get it through to Air Ops and Supplot.” Supplementary Plot was where electronic-warfare-intelligence information and various other sources were cross-indexed to update the carrier’s picture of the ocean around her. Rafe turned to the boat’s captain, a former F-18 pilot. His leather flight jacket’s patch said “Hank Rogers.” Only a score of old buddies like Rafe knew his name was really Reginald.

“Hank? Launch the alert five, okay? I have to put some teeth down there to cover the Canucks.”

“On the way,” Hank murmured, already on the phone to the air boss.

AG 703, in the Stack 2NM NNE of the USS Thomas Jefferson

Lieutenant Evan Soleck’s had been the fourth plane to launch after the local Combat Air Patrol and he got it into the air without a hitch. He had no back end to worry about, because he was a mission tanker for a sea-strike package that would launch later in the event—twenty thousand pounds of fuel to give while airborne—but intellectual curiosity made him get the back end up from his pilot console so that he could run his passive electronic-surveillance antennas and follow the action.

His copilot, a nugget from Iowa called “Guppy” because of the facial expressions he generated while concentrating on his instruments, had his hands full merely following the checklists and couldn’t believe his pilot was wasting time on backseater crap. “If the skipper wanted us doing that stuff, he’d have sent us up with guys in the back,” Guppy said in a put-upon tone.

Soleck watched him flail through the checklist. That was me, last cruise, he thought. And continued the ritualistic pattern of bringing the computers on line. Oh, for the MARI we had at the det. New computers, enhanced antennas, the works. Soleck had flown in a special det under Al Craik and it had spoiled him for these old planes and their antique systems.

USS Thomas Jefferson

In the windowed bubble below the Jefferson‘s bridge, the air boss was trying to launch forty aircraft for the opening reconnaissance of the exercise. Every F-18, every S-3, all the EA-6B Prowlers—it was a major launch, and it took his full concentration to keep the overcrowded flight deck from becoming a disaster. A sailor pushed a yellow sticky into his line of sight. Launch the alert five AAW.

The air boss looked at the line waiting to get off cats three and four. The event had started, and he had planes five deep in the queue already.

“Tell the tower to hold three and four until the alert is launched.” The alert—an aircraft held on the shortest tether, ready to launch in five minutes—was sitting on cat two, with the second plane somewhere toward the stern. He held the note out to a spotter and motioned that they needed to get that second plane through the traffic jam and on the cat.

“Now launch the alert five AAW,” the air boss said into the ship’s 1MC. He cycled his comms from the Guard frequency that he monitored in his headset to the AAW net while trying to read the spidery writing on the launch board behind him. Donitz. AG 203.

“Alpha Gulf 203, you ready?” he said.

“Green and green.”

Lieutenant-Commander Chris Donitz was already in the shuttle. The air boss watched the twin vertical stabilizers tremble in the heat distortion as Donitz moved the plane to full power, and then he was off, rotating just off the cat to clear the hull of the ship.

Alpha Whiskey, the air warfare commander off to starboard on the missile cruiser Fort Klock, came up before the air boss had toggled back to Guard, giving orders to Donitz as he roared away from the ship in his F-18. “Alpha Gulf 203, intercept two goblins inbound on the 090 radial at 9000.”

Somewhere above him, Donitz said, “Roger,” before the air boss had switched freqs and noted from his comm card that “goblins” were Indian Air Force Jaguars. He didn’t question why Indian Jaguars had to be intercepted; his job was down here. He watched a sailor put a check next to AG 203 on the launch board, then looked down at the deck and saw that AG 114 was next to launch for the alert five.

“Spot, you got 114 moving yet?”

“Trying to get the S-3 off cat three so I can move the E-2 and get him space.”

The air boss looked down at the deck again and saw the S-3 on cat three as the jet-blast deflector rose out of the deck to protect the planes waiting behind her from the backwash of her engines. “What’s that S-3 doing?” he said into his mike.

“Something about their shuttle.”

The air boss stifled his desire to say something savage. Out on the deck, a sweating kid was struggling with some bent piece of metal under the nose wheel of a plane older than he was, surrounded by fumes and jet blast and God knew what else. No amount of attitude from the air boss would make it happen any faster.

AG 703

“Got it,” Soleck said, looking at a first harvest of ESM cuts from his S-3’s back end.

“You said we were in EMCON, Ev.”

“We are in EMCON. I’m not radiating anything; I’m looking at what other folks are radiating.”

Against his own inclination, Guppy leaned forward to look at the screen on his armrest.

“See? That’s the air-search radar on one of the Indian picket ships.” Soleck put his cursor over one of the signals so that Guppy could see it.

“You don’t know that.”

Soleck exhaled in frustration. “Yeah, Gup, I do. So would you if you learned your radar parameters. That’s not one of ours, and it’s too much in the air-search freq to be anything but one of theirs. Civilian ships don’t mount antennas like that, right? See the sweep? And anyway, that’s Owl Screech, a Russian targeting radar on one of their Russian-built ships.”

“And you just know all that.”

“Yeah. I also know that we’re off our altitude by a long shot and starting a long turn to the right because the copilot isn’t really paying attention.”

Guppy swung his eyes to the instruments and the plane snapped to attention. “You—”

Soleck thought Yeah, I’m being unfair. Whatever. He ran the cursor over the battle group and looked. He could read some low-power emissions from the flight deck, guys talking to the tower for launch at radio freqs. In full EMCON, they wouldn’t do even that. Otherwise, the battle group was pretty invisible. Looked tight. He kept widening his search ring, keeping one eye on his nugget’s flying and one ear on the launch of their strike package. He could hear the air boss berating 706, the other S-3, which had some kind of mechanical failure while in tension.

He got distracted by air-search radar off to the south, followed almost immediately by a targeting radar. His stomach fluttered. He understood as soon as he got a second cut. That would be Fort Klock, probably engaging the first Indian strikes. Cool. Soleck liked to see what was going on, and he liked to figure things out. He intended to be an admiral himself, one day.

“706 is ready to launch,” Guppy said.

Soleck decided not to tell Guppy that he could listen to the radio, too. He got another cut way to the north, up near the Lakshadweep Islands, very weak. He played with it a little, got a second cut. The parameters were way up in the comms range and looked naggingly familiar.

Alpha Whiskey came up on the air command freq and passed a vector to an F-18 just launching. Soleck smiled when he heard Chris Donitz responding in his Minnesota voice. Donitz—“Donuts” to everybody who flew—had just made lieutenant-commander. Donitz was being told to intercept a couple of Indian Jaguars. Old aircraft, no match for the F-18, Soleck thought, probably simulating missiles. Get ‘em, Donuts!

USS Thomas Jefferson

“Where the hell is Al Craik?” Rafe barked at his flag lieutenant.

“Nothing on any of our freqs. Nothing on satcom. It’s like the whole of Mahe has gone off the air.”

“Fuck me.” Rafe realized that he had uttered the words and regretted them. Admirals were encouraged to avoid the foul language so normal at every other level. Hank flashed him a smile, as if he was glad that Rafe was still one of the boys.

“Skipper?” a sailor behind the captain said. “CAG on two. He has a plane missing.”

Rafe looked at Hank while he took the call. “Yeah,” was all he said, and a few seconds later “yeah” again. Then, to Rafe, “AG 702 hasn’t been up on link or radar for ten minutes and CAG is worried.” AG 702 was the S-3 that Rafe had allowed to go out early.

“Stevens is lying low out there.” Rafe was staring at the mess around cat three. “He’s in EMCON, too.”

“Yeah,” said Hank.

“Tell CAG that once the E-2 is airborne, we’ll get a squeak out of 702.”

“Yeah.” The captain murmured into his headset. “He says thanks.”

Rafe thought that the CAG was a nervous ninny who had been promoted above his level of competence, but he kept that view strictly to himself. So far, the worst thing about being a battle group commander was finding that many of the people he liked as drinking buddies were not up to the challenges of big command. Right now, for example, he was ready to kill Alan Craik, whose silence was ruining his day.

“Alpha Whiskey for you, sir.”

“Admiral, 203 is a minute from intercept with those goblins and they won’t respond to radio calls. 203 wants to know how you want to play it.”

This was the gray area where exercise and reality and pride and pilot envy could all get messed up. Rafe didn’t want the Indians to even have an argument that their “missiles” had hit his ship. He worried, too, that the Indian “missiles” would turn back into airplanes when they spotted 203 and prompt an engagement that would waste fuel. He wanted them to admit that they were exercise-dead—and stay that way.

“Tell 203 to get them up on exercise guard and tell them they’re dead from surface-to-air-missiles back before their launch point. If they ignore him, he’s to engage.”

Even while he spoke, the S-3 on catapult three rolled forward into the shuttle at long last, dipped her nose as she went under tension, and leaped like a fat old cat into the air. That S-3 had cost his ship five minutes of launch time, and he could imagine the mayhem it had wreaked down in Air Ops, with pilots aloft clamoring for gas and pilots on the deck eager to launch. He was hot even in the air-conditioned comfort of the flag bridge. Rafe looked at the flag JOTS repeater and waved to one of his staff. “Can you raise Commander Craik on the JOTS?” Even if all of Mahe was down, Al’s JOTS should still function. Why isn’t he thinking this shit? Rafe thought irritably. He took a swallow of coffee. Cold. Ugh.

On the screen of the JOTS, Rafe saw 203 intercept the two Indian Jaguars. One of them turned away at once and headed back for the coast, changing his flight speed and course as prescribed in the exercise book to show that he was exercise-dead. Score one for the good guys.

But the other kept coming.

“Goblin Two will not respond to calls and is inbound toward the missile engagement zone,” Alpha Whiskey said.

The ship’s captain called from his big chair on the port side. “I want to turn to starboard to unmask my aft CIWS.” The Close-In Weapons System was a cannon capable of incredible bursts of very accurate fire to hit missiles at close range.

Rafe wanted to ignore the “dead” Jaguar and continue the launch of aircraft, but he understood that exercises were to train everybody and that ship handling mattered, too. Faced with real missiles, the captain would try to get every defense system on target. Broadside on, just like the age of Nelson.

“Do it.”

Hank leaned over his mike. “Execute,” he said.

Instantly the noise of the ship changed and she rolled to starboard as her helm was put over. It was one of the fastest turns he’d experienced on a carrier.

Madje caught his eye and pointed at the JOTS, shaking his head. “Mahe master terminal is off the air,” he said.

Rafe felt a little chill in his gut.

The ship leaned harder to starboard. The whole deck was vibrating. Rafe saw Hank’s grin, realized that Hank had planned this maneuver and was on the ball. It was well executed, too, and he saw the helmsman beaming.

Good for them, he thought. Glad I let him. Somewhere in the back of his mind where he kept score, Hank Rogers got a little plus sign on a future fitrep.

Down a level, the air boss was putting the whole deck on hold as they heeled sharply. He’d had less than a minute’s warning about what the captain intended. The flight deck was still jammed, but the respite was giving the spotters time to get the second alert five up to cat two and the E-2 command plane up to cat three, despite the cant to the deck.

Almost there, he thought.

AG 703

“Turn us to 180, Gup,” Soleck said, craning his neck. “Sounds to me like the Indians jumped the gun and we have a missile strike coming in.” He looked out over the sunlit sea and up to the clouds, trying to find the two Indian Jaguars mentioned on the AAW frequency. They were clearly in radar silence, as he didn’t have anything on the S-3’s primitive ESM. Now if they were in the water—

In the water fired a synapse somewhere in his brain. That weak signal up north was a rescue transponder. That’s why the freq looked familiar. Man in the water!

He was reaching for the radio when he saw the Jaguar, a high glinting in the sunlight, starting its steep descent to imitate a missile heading for its target—the carrier.

USS Thomas Jefferson

“Goblin’s not responding to the tower.”

“Fuck him.” Rafe couldn’t remember an exercise with such dicked-up comms. Was the guy really an asshole, or had someone put out the wrong freqs? Who knew?

“He’s less than a minute out and starting his pop.”

A pop-up was a typical terminal maneuver in most anti-ship missiles. The missile would climb sharply after it chose its target, then come down as nearly vertical into the deck of the target as possible. The Indian pilot was going for realism.

“He’s too fucking close,” from Air Ops.

The Jefferson was still turning, her aft anti-missile systems unmasked and “firing” for exercise purposes, but the rate of turn had slowed and Rafe felt the thunk of a plane launching, almost certainly the second F-18, headed south.

“Get him the fuck out of our airspace!” the same voice in Air Ops shouted.

Rafe glanced around, and something moved in his peripheral vision, and then the world exploded.

AG 703

Soleck was two miles to the north of the stack of the carrier and just turning inbound to establish his refueling track, more attention on his armrest data screen than on his instruments, when movement in his peripheral vision caused his eyes to flick into an instrument scan and out over sea—

“Holy mother of God,” Soleck said.

There was a fireball rising from the deck of the carrier like a Hollywood special effect, orange and white and spreading from the bow to the stern, the violent red pulses punctuated by streaks of white rising from the flames. The fireball itself rose so high that the island, the command node of the carrier, vanished in an orange bloom.

His plane shook, and then a fist of air nearly struck them from the sky.

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